The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World

The Synthetic Situation: Interactionism for a Global World

Presented as the Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 1, 2008, this article rethinks central assumptions of the interaction order as conceptualized by Goffman and others with respect to global domains of activity.1 It proposes two new concepts, that of the synthetic situation and that of time transac...

From a word to a world: the current situation in the interdisciplinary field of synthetic biology

Using a carefully designed search query, we describe the field of synthetic biology in terms of leading countries, organizations and funding sources. Besides articles we also paid some attention to patents. The USA is the leading country in this field, followed by China. There is a clear exponential growth in the field of synthetic biology over the latest 14 years. Keywords were analyzed using ...

A review of the world cannabis situation.

Cannabis is the world's most widely cultivated and consumed illicit drug, but there remain major gaps in our understanding of global cannabis markets. For example, it appears that premium sinsemilla cannabis, often produced indoors in consumer countries, has become more potent in recent years and that its market share is also growing in some areas. This may be leading to greater localization of...

A Synthetic Task Environment for Measuring Cyber Situation Awareness

Preparing synthetic biology for the world

Synthetic Biology promises low-cost, exponentially scalable products and global health solutions in the form of self-replicating organisms, or "living devices." As these promises are realized, proof-of-concept systems will gradually migrate from tightly regulated laboratory or industrial environments into private spaces as, for instance, probiotic health products, food, and even do-it-yourself ...